by Christopher Conte

About the author: Christopher Conte is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

The idea of linking schools to the computer network known as the Internet has become one of the hottest education topics of the 1990s. President Clinton has said the U.S. should set a national goal of connecting every school to the information superhighway by the year 2000. “I want to get the children of America hooked on education through computers,” Clinton said in a speech in California September 21, 1995, adding, “we must make technological literacy a standard.”

The Cost of Computers for Schools

But Clinton’s networking goal almost certainly is beyond reach. Currently, just 3 percent of the nation’s elementary, middle and high school classrooms have Internet connections, and only about 16 percent of teachers use the Internet or...